The Neighbor: A Detective D. D. Warren Novel by Lisa Gardner

Author:Lisa Gardner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 1409101037
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2009-06-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

People go through their lives gearing up for the big moments. We plan blowout celebrations for key benchmarks—the twenty-first-birthday bash, the engagement party, the wedding celebration, the baby shower We celebrate and hoot and holler and try to honor the big stuff, because, well, it’s the big stuff

Likewise, we steel ourselves for the major blows. The community that rallies behind the survivors of a deadly house fire. The family that comes together for the funeral of the cancer-stricken young father The best friend who sticks around for your first weekend as a newly divorced mom. We see the big things coming and we prepare ourselves for the lead roles in our own personal dramas. It makes us feel better about things. Stronger Look at me, I made it.

Of course, we’re totally missing all the moments in between. The day-to-day life that is what it is. Nothing to celebrate. Nothing to mourn. Just tasks to perform.

I’m convinced these are the moments that ultimately make us or break us. Like a wave lapping against the same boulder day after day, eroding the stone, shaping the line of the shore, the ordinary minutia of our lives holds the real power, and thus all the hidden danger The daily things we do, or don’t do, without ever understanding the long-term ramification of such minor acts.

For example, I ended the world as I knew it on Saturday, August 30, the day I bought Jason an iPod for his birthday.

Ree and I were shopping together She needed school clothes, I wanted some supplies to finish setting up my first classroom. We walked into Target, saw the iPods, and I thought immediately of Jason. He loved listening to music, and lately he’d taken up running. With an iPod he could combine two of his favorite activities.

We smuggled the credit card-sized musical masterpiece home by hiding it in my school supplies. Later, when he and Ree were wrestling together in the family room, I stashed the iPod in a kitchen drawer, beneath the stack of oven mitts, where it would be closer to the computer.

Ree and I had already plotted the whole thing out in the car How we’d secretly set up the iPod for him, downloading tons of rock-n-roll, in lieu of Jason’s beloved classical music Thanks to the movie Flushed Away, Ree was familiar with the works of Billy Idol and Fatboy Slim. On Sunday mornings, when Jason’s insomnia sometimes caught up with him and he slept past nine, Ree’s new favorite way of waking her father was to blast Dancing with Myself throughout the entire house. Because nothing gets a George Winston lover out of bed faster than a British rock star.

We were very pleased with ourselves.

Saturday night was family night, so we held tight. Sunday, around five, Jason announced he needed to head for the office. He had to review some sources, get a first draft of a feature piece of Southie’s Irish pub scene together, etc., etc. Ree and I practically ushered him out the door.

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